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Biography

Fiona Donovan is a New York-based art historian and writer, with a Ph.D. from Columbia University. Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish Gertrude, her biography of the sculptor and art patron Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in the spring of 2027. Donovan is the author of Jasper Johns: Pictures within Pictures, 1890-2015 (a New York Times Best Book of 2017), as well as essays and articles in the New York Times and Vanity Fair, and many other publications. She has worked as a curator and teacher, with students ranging from first grade through high school in New York City, and students, faculty and staff at the University of Minnesota. She was a Whitney Museum trustee for thirty years and currently serves on the board of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Selected Publication

The Tragic, Never-Told Love Story of a Gilded Age-Era Romance
Vanity Fair, December 30, 2025

Retracing the Spanish Path of My Ancestor, the Founder of the Whitney
New York Times, October 9, 2019

Mark Fox: Full Circle. Houston, TX
Hiram Butler Gallery, 2018

Lessons for a Daughter
Foreword to The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made
New York: Arcade Publishing, second edition, 2017

Peter Paul Rubens entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
Oxford University Press, 2004

The Woodblock Prints of B.J.O. Nordfeldt: A Catalogue Raisonné
Minneapolis, MN: University Art Museum, 1991

David Salle Exhibition
Institute of Contemporary Art, 1986 (wrote chronology, bibliography, exhibition history)

Images and Impressions: Painters Who Print
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1983 (essays on artists Roger Herman and Mimmo Paladino)

Selected Press

The Best Art Books of 2017
New York Times, 2017

Whitney Stories
Whitney Museum of American Art, 2015

Fiona Donovan

Gertrude: The Life and Times of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney

Jasper Johns: Pictures within Pictures

Rubens and England